Fingers Tapping and Open Eyes
by Who Shot AR
Summary: Valerie's life was nearly over when she scribbled out her autobiography on a bit of toilet paper. The key word, of course, being 'nearly'. This fic was written as a personal challenge, to see if I could adapt another author's descriptive style for V4V.


**Title:** Fingers Tapping and Open Eyes

**Rating:** PG

**Author's Note:** A few months ago, I read Richard Fariña's _Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me_, and his descriptions of the central character's drug trips appealed to me a great deal. The point of this was to see if I could write in the same sort of style, adapting the subject matter for the V for Vendetta universe. Opening quote taken entirely out of context, but since Fariña did the same thing for his novel, I call it fair.

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**Fingers Tapping and Open Eyes**

"_Everything is dark, almost like any sleep-dark, only the medium isn't just in front of you like a plane, or a wall. It goes off to both sides, it wraps right around your peripheral vision. You can actually feel it behind you; maybe under you, only the 'under' part isn't too clear. Little tingles of blue at the edge, but it's not exactly an edge. Then it's as if you've just thrown a pearl into the sky." – Richard Fariña_

Valerie was gone.

She was stuffed into a hole not fit for a rat, holding her breath until someone thought to look inside it. They would find a blue, dead woman wrapped up in toilet paper.

The woman left next to Valerie's final words wondered vaguely how long it was since she crawled as an earthworm to the chink in the stones and pushed in an autobiography she could no longer claim as her own. It transformed into its own person, stealing away the essence of its writer, the second it was sent off to fates unknown.

She didn't touch that wall any more. If Valerie rotted into a skeleton and disintegrated until only dust remained inside it, she didn't want the knowledge as one more weight pressing her face into the floor.

Ten minutes since she let Valerie journey toward the man woman creature screaming to her left. Two centuries, and she never made it. A week, and whatever lived next to her shared its space with a woman who clawed through the walls to find it. Time sped up and slowed without her notice. Endings changed, beginnings fell to pieces, but nothing happened during the stretching, yawning middle.

And rules changed. The sun was rectangular and lived at eye level. The heavens were eaten away and left a ripped, fathomless dark above. Night lived with her and wrapped up everything in a frigid blanket, sprinkled dusty confusion into her eyes and ears. Day skipped by intermittently, singing taunting hymns and encouraging the invisible clouds to accompany with heavy, shallow, breathy winds. Sometimes she was the cloud and the sun multiplied above her, appearing again and again in her half-closed eyelids as she felt her feet skid the stone earth.

Cold.

She can't feel her feet. Her fingers tap silently against the stone. Only thing she feels. Her arms her face her breasts her knees are all gone. Tap. Tap tap tap tap tap. No sound comes from it: she can't remember if she has nails to make sound with anymore, and even if she did, her ears have been eaten away like the sky and her name.

The sun leaves again and she's not surprised. It stays shorter and shorter each time. Gone. Did she close her eyelids?

Does she have eyelids anymore?

An entire wall of light, of fickle painful sunshine, pricks at her eyeballs. Going up, hauled away. Can't feel any needles in her arm or palms on her thighs. She's fingers tapping and open eyes and far away from here, in the center of the sun, she might be a soul.

When the sun dashes off again, she isn't sorry. Gone again to pick at other moaning eyes and fingers without nails and ask them if they understand.

She stares blankly when she hears the question. No mouth to answer with.

Suddenly she has a stomach again. Something claws at it from the inside out and the outside is ripping apart at the same time. Darkness and the sunlight comes back but not for her and her fingers have thought without her. They can feel the spiders multiplying within her, climbing legs over legs and biting everything they feel. Spiders, tarantulas, where did that word come from? They are filling her with poison and her fingers will rip every last one of them out again and tear them leg from leg.

But her fingers have no nails and can't stop the snakes growing into her arms and legs, the cockroaches biting off each others' heads inside her skull. Nothing can stop them eating away at each other and her newly found tongue. She will be devoured until only a woman's skin remains, flat on the floor, stretching to grasp the hand of the corpse in the wall and pull it out. They would die, sisters together in that space.

It's day again, a roomful of day with a shadow figure to keep it from flooding into her. From her flooding into it and burning away the snakes and nightmares, returning a whole woman resplendent in orange velvet. Pauses that last an hour and a half fill the figure and suddenly, it's night again.

A few minutes later, or a day after that, she knows where the sky has gone. It is writhing beneath her skin, cursing the creeping, slinking, grim things holding her body captive from her. They are shriveling away and her arms are her own again, the remnants of her mind empty of scrabbling insect legs. The sky slithers up her throat and over her tongue and she can feel legs sticking out haphazard from its blue skin, spider legs it was too full to swallow. It starts out a pinprick in her eyes and stretches like a cat. Uses the excess legs and scales and pincers to climb the walls and cover her, a canopy chasing away the night and drawing her up, into its embrace.

She warms, burns, until there is no feeling beyond the scalding newness of a cloudless sky.

Valerie is gone.


End file.
